As known, a wide range of plastic bottles are formed in carousel-type blow moulding machines from plastic preforms. In particular, the heated preforms are accommodated in correspondingly designed blow moulds of the blow moulding machine and are then blown, during rotation of the blow moulding machine, under high pressure and high temperature to form respective bottles.
The bottles exiting from the blow moulding machine are then transferred to a carousel-type filling machine, where such bottles are filled with a pourable product of the above-mentioned type. At this point, the bottles are capped in a further carousel and subsequently transferred to a labeling machine. It is often necessary to provide a long transfer from the capping machine to the labeling machine to allow the bottles to be externally dried prior to proceed with the application of the labels.
In general, in the known apparatuses, there are long transfer paths between the above-indicated different machines, partly also with interposition of buffers; as a consequence, facilities suitable to house this kind of apparatuses need to be relatively extensive, i.e. they require a lot of space.
A need is particularly felt in this field to reduce the footprint of the apparatuses for producing, filling, capping and labeling plastic bottles.
A solution to this problem has been proposed in US 2011/0056172, wherein the labeling machine has been interposed between the blow moulding machine and the filling machine, so that no drying operation is required prior to start the labeling operation, as the bottles exit perfectly clean and dry from the blow moulding machine. However, it is necessary to provide a change of pitch from the blow moulding machine to the labeling machine.
In addition, in the proposed solution of US 2011/0056172, the bottles are transferred without buffers among the blow moulding machine, the labeling machine and the filling machine.
This recently-proposed solution still leaves room for further improvements, especially as to achieve a further reduction of the apparatus footprint and a simplification of the adjustments necessary to synchronize the different processing machines.